Science: Onward & Upward

The Army Air Forces’ bright blue yonder is not going to be big enough to hold it. Last week the Air Forces’ bright young men, who don’t have to be very bright to know that the planes of World War II are already obsolete, were busy promoting a grand-scale Air Engineering Development Center for studying and testing the air weapons of tomorrow. They talked Buck Rogers language. Some topics: supersonic aircraft—piloted and pilotless—planes and rockets powered by nuclear energy, space ships, space bases that would float above the atmosphere, where gravity’s pull is weak as a kitten’s. An old-line pilot might just as well hang up his goggles and retire.

The new Center would crowd the coyotes out of a 100-square-mile patch of desert, probably somewhere near Boulder Dam or Grand Coulee. Site specifications called for level country surrounded by hilly terrain for “shielding hazardous developments,” one million horsepower of cheap electric power, a steady flow of cold water at a rate of 250,000 gallons a minute. By 1955, said the Army, some 4,000 men would be working at the Center.

Test equipment, still in blueprint, was as fantastic as the job to be done. There would be five supersonic wind tunnels—one of them kicking up a breeze of 7,500 m.p.h., ten times the speed of sound. A stationary test stand would measure the thrust of jets and rockets at power ratings up to 500,000 Ibs., ten times the power of aV-2.

The Army is ready to go. All it needs is a $300 million appropriation.